1. Field of the Invention
The invention herein presented relates to a new fire control system, which utilizes a compressed ambient or atmospheric air mass flow, considered as a gas mixture (dry air and superheated water vapor), as the working agent needed to activate its flames containment and suppression mechanisms, performing also the aspersion of a fire fight agent, generating heat transfer, gas mixture components separation, and gas dynamics processes in a jacketed convergent-divergent nozzle to produce a high speed ambient air jet containing water droplets, which penetrates the flames fronts and blast the flames origin, bringing about such flames blown off.
2. Description of Related Art
Out of control fires, in particular near-city forests fires (wildland-suburban interface) present severe threats to both life and property and the risk for any community is always present. Therefore, a critical need exists for more innovative and more effective fire control methods.
Current active methods used to suppress flames of different kinds, use various procedures: by the combustion inhibition through the wetting and cooling of the flames site using water splashes and jets, or water sprays and mists, such water been obtained from natural reservoirs or man made deposits; by the use of gases such as carbon dioxide; and also, by the use of foams and other chemical additives, but all of them, utilize the direct aspersion of their respective fire fight agent as the only mechanism to execute the flame suppression action, and therefore, in some situations, they present a limited, not continuous, and not always prompt enough supply of any of these agents in the fire location, specially in forest fires.
These methods at present in service for flames suppression, have proved or demonstrated in actual circumstances, not to be as effective as required, in particular in massive widespread intense forest fires (trees and grasslands).
The inventor has found through computational simulations and verified through actual experimental observations, that the thermodynamic state of the superheated water vapor present in different amounts in the ambient or atmospheric air (a gas mixture), can be modified, even in very high temperature surroundings, not only to a liquid thermodynamic state (droplets), but also to a solid state (ice packets), if a compressed ambient air mass flow with the required temperature, pressure, and humidity conditions is fed to a convergent-divergent nozzle and is allowed to expand with the necessary thermal protections.
Furthermore, flame aerodynamics is well known to be involved in the survival of the steady chemical reaction that permits a combustion process to remain and grow. Disruption of atmospheric flames aerodynamic natural conditions by external (non-natural) fluid mechanisms (high speed air jets), can bring about the flames blown off and the extinction of the combustion process.
Different new inventions for fire control systems studied in the prior art literature, keep using water sprays or mists as their active agent (water droplets), but those systems, on the one hand, only pulverize water from an initial equivalent liquid state utilizing different innovative atomization techniques, and therefore, maintain the water supply limitation and a diminished capability to handle intense fires due to the untimely water droplets evaporation before reaching the flames' origin. On the other hand, new fire control systems also incorporate particular aspersion methods to deliver their active fire fight agent to the flames' origin (including direct water jets), but all these aspersion methods do not include any additional fluid mechanisms to penetrate the flame front and disrupt the natural aerodynamic conditions bringing about the flame blown off, and therefore remain totally dependent on a process of cooling, wetting and even flooding the flames site to extinguish the fire, with an important water consumption and consequently a not continuous intense fire fight work.
A wide category of other new fire control systems studied, use different approaches with chemical agents (gas, liquid and solid), foams and catalytic surfaces, but all these systems are unable to use ambient air jets specifically as its flame suppressor agent and/or mechanism, and therefore remain implicitly characterized by a limited fire fight effectiveness due to the fact that they are totally dependent, not only again on the supply, but also on the aspersion mechanism of their respective, and only, fire control agent, with a poor, if any, individual deliberate mechanism to attack the flames' natural aerodynamic conditions.
Other inventors in the prior art mention or describe systems that use convergent-divergent nozzles to condensate different vapors including pure water vapor (steam), utilizing normal or condensation shocks waves in supersonic flows, but none of these systems has the specific purpose of fire control and no one gets water vapor from the ambient air involved as the working substance motive of the given invention.
None of the patents and applications consulted, either teaches or suggests the “ambient-air jet blast flames containment and suppression system” motive of the invention herein presented, characterized by its main active fire control agent, by its containment and aspersion methods, and by its aerodynamic flame suppression and combustion inhibition mechanisms.